This chapter explores the original paradigm of vagabondage. An increasingly totemic concept in European women’s travel writing from the 1850s onwards, vagabondage offers an alternative model of ...
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This chapter explores the original paradigm of vagabondage. An increasingly totemic concept in European women’s travel writing from the 1850s onwards, vagabondage offers an alternative model of mobility and gender construction. The chapter begins by mapping the development of vagabondage from its historical origins to its reformulation as women’s movement from 1850. From forced economic migration in fourteenth-century Europe, vagabondage gradually metamorphoses into a criminal activity, a seditious plague on the nation state, as close textual analysis of Royal Statutes from Britain and France shows. It also constitutes a marginal literary movement, from Elizabethan rogue’s literature to Victor Hugo’s vagabond heroes. The chapter uses Isabelle Eberhardt’s early travel writing and Colette’s La Vagabonde (1911) to elucidate the central characteristics and themes of women’s vagabondage. The final section examines official repression of female vagabondage and the appearance of modern ‘rogue literature’ as a response to this repression in the travelogues of Freya Stark.Less

Walk Like a Man : Vagabondage and Gender Construction

Dúnlaith Bird

Published in print: 2012-07-12

This chapter explores the original paradigm of vagabondage. An increasingly totemic concept in European women’s travel writing from the 1850s onwards, vagabondage offers an alternative model of mobility and gender construction. The chapter begins by mapping the development of vagabondage from its historical origins to its reformulation as women’s movement from 1850. From forced economic migration in fourteenth-century Europe, vagabondage gradually metamorphoses into a criminal activity, a seditious plague on the nation state, as close textual analysis of Royal Statutes from Britain and France shows. It also constitutes a marginal literary movement, from Elizabethan rogue’s literature to Victor Hugo’s vagabond heroes. The chapter uses Isabelle Eberhardt’s early travel writing and Colette’s La Vagabonde (1911) to elucidate the central characteristics and themes of women’s vagabondage. The final section examines official repression of female vagabondage and the appearance of modern ‘rogue literature’ as a response to this repression in the travelogues of Freya Stark.

The idea for the Superconducting Super Collider emerged from high-energy physicists’ ambitions to build a next-generation particle accelerator to enable research on elementary particles at the ...
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The idea for the Superconducting Super Collider emerged from high-energy physicists’ ambitions to build a next-generation particle accelerator to enable research on elementary particles at the trillion-electron-volt energy scale. After years of discussions about building such a machine internationally, with participating countries sharing the costs, US physicists put forth a new initiative based on advances in superconducting magnet technology achieved in building the Fermilab Tevatron. Responding to encouragement from Reagan science advisor George Keyworth and eager to regain US leadership in their field, they proposed building an enormous proton collider as a national project, open to participation by foreign scientists. In July 1983 a panel of high-energy physicists recommended that the Department of Energy cancel Brookhaven’s faltering Isabelle/CBA project and instead construct the SSC. Foreign reactions to this decision were largely negative; European physicists opted instead to continue pursuing their own multi-TeV collider, the Large Hadron Collider.Less

Origins of the Super Collider

Michael RiordanLillian HoddesonAdrienne W. Kolb

Published in print: 2015-11-16

The idea for the Superconducting Super Collider emerged from high-energy physicists’ ambitions to build a next-generation particle accelerator to enable research on elementary particles at the trillion-electron-volt energy scale. After years of discussions about building such a machine internationally, with participating countries sharing the costs, US physicists put forth a new initiative based on advances in superconducting magnet technology achieved in building the Fermilab Tevatron. Responding to encouragement from Reagan science advisor George Keyworth and eager to regain US leadership in their field, they proposed building an enormous proton collider as a national project, open to participation by foreign scientists. In July 1983 a panel of high-energy physicists recommended that the Department of Energy cancel Brookhaven’s faltering Isabelle/CBA project and instead construct the SSC. Foreign reactions to this decision were largely negative; European physicists opted instead to continue pursuing their own multi-TeV collider, the Large Hadron Collider.

Drawing on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Ilya Prigogine in conjunction with Isabelle Stengers, this chapter traces some of the problematic theological underpinnings of the specifically ...
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Drawing on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Ilya Prigogine in conjunction with Isabelle Stengers, this chapter traces some of the problematic theological underpinnings of the specifically modern dichotomization (“bifurcation” in Whitehead's language) between human culture and nature's processes that has centrally informed current discourses around “energy.” Whitehead's process philosophy provides an alternative to the reductive materialism that justifies current environmental exploitation, seeing at the base of reality not some mute, mindless matter or energy—knowledge of which can only exist in an ontologically separate, “mental” sphere—but instead a co-creative process of ecological becoming set in motion by an immanent divine “lure” towards “intensity.” A theology of “intensive alliance,” as the chapter calls it, encourages us to encounter the living God in and through the webs of dynamic human/non-human partnerships that are the basis of a healthy ecology.Less

Energy, Ecology, and Intensive Alliance: Bringing Earth Back to Heaven

Luke B. Higgins

Published in print: 2011-12-02

Drawing on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Ilya Prigogine in conjunction with Isabelle Stengers, this chapter traces some of the problematic theological underpinnings of the specifically modern dichotomization (“bifurcation” in Whitehead's language) between human culture and nature's processes that has centrally informed current discourses around “energy.” Whitehead's process philosophy provides an alternative to the reductive materialism that justifies current environmental exploitation, seeing at the base of reality not some mute, mindless matter or energy—knowledge of which can only exist in an ontologically separate, “mental” sphere—but instead a co-creative process of ecological becoming set in motion by an immanent divine “lure” towards “intensity.” A theology of “intensive alliance,” as the chapter calls it, encourages us to encounter the living God in and through the webs of dynamic human/non-human partnerships that are the basis of a healthy ecology.

This chapter focuses on filmmaker Raja Amari. Amari was born into a middle-class family in Tunis in 1971. She studied French literature and civilisation at the University of Tunis I, before going on ...
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This chapter focuses on filmmaker Raja Amari. Amari was born into a middle-class family in Tunis in 1971. She studied French literature and civilisation at the University of Tunis I, before going on to study film at FEMIS in Paris, from which she graduated in 1998. Before making her first feature, Satin Rouge (2002), Amari made three short films, beginning with The Bouquet/Le Bouquet (1995). Her best known short is April/Avril (1998), an atmospheric thirty-minute piece shot in 35mm and dealing with a ten-year-old girl, Amina, who comes to Tunis to work as a maid to two lonely sisters. In 2004 Amari completed her first video documentary, Tracking Oblivion/Sur les traces de l'oubli, which deals with an emblematic figure in North African feminism, the nineteenth-century European explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, who lived with all the freedom of a man and had a particular regard for the spartan life of the Bedouin tribes.Less

Raja Amari (Tunisia)

Roy Armes

Published in print: 2006-08-01

This chapter focuses on filmmaker Raja Amari. Amari was born into a middle-class family in Tunis in 1971. She studied French literature and civilisation at the University of Tunis I, before going on to study film at FEMIS in Paris, from which she graduated in 1998. Before making her first feature, Satin Rouge (2002), Amari made three short films, beginning with The Bouquet/Le Bouquet (1995). Her best known short is April/Avril (1998), an atmospheric thirty-minute piece shot in 35mm and dealing with a ten-year-old girl, Amina, who comes to Tunis to work as a maid to two lonely sisters. In 2004 Amari completed her first video documentary, Tracking Oblivion/Sur les traces de l'oubli, which deals with an emblematic figure in North African feminism, the nineteenth-century European explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, who lived with all the freedom of a man and had a particular regard for the spartan life of the Bedouin tribes.

Drawing from Bruno Latour and using the case of La Luz del Mundo, a Mexican Pentecostal church in Atlanta, as an example, this chapter demonstrates the payoffs of a non-reductive, materialist, ...
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Drawing from Bruno Latour and using the case of La Luz del Mundo, a Mexican Pentecostal church in Atlanta, as an example, this chapter demonstrates the payoffs of a non-reductive, materialist, networks approach to the study of religion. By embedding embodied, historical human actors in vascularized and inter-active ecological figurations from which they have evolved, and through and within which they carve out shared and contested spaces of livelihood, this approach moves beyond the Cartesian-Kantian model of the sovereign, unified, and buffered subject dominant in Western modernity and religious studies, more specifically, allowing for a rich exploration of the multiple processes and materials that make religious phenomena efficacious. The chapter concludes by endorsing Isabelle Stengers’s notion of a cosmopolitics that is maximally inclusive in its engagement with alterity.Less

Vascularizing the Study of Religion: Multi-Agent Figurations and Cosmopolitics

Manuel A. Vásquez

Published in print: 2017-08-08

Drawing from Bruno Latour and using the case of La Luz del Mundo, a Mexican Pentecostal church in Atlanta, as an example, this chapter demonstrates the payoffs of a non-reductive, materialist, networks approach to the study of religion. By embedding embodied, historical human actors in vascularized and inter-active ecological figurations from which they have evolved, and through and within which they carve out shared and contested spaces of livelihood, this approach moves beyond the Cartesian-Kantian model of the sovereign, unified, and buffered subject dominant in Western modernity and religious studies, more specifically, allowing for a rich exploration of the multiple processes and materials that make religious phenomena efficacious. The chapter concludes by endorsing Isabelle Stengers’s notion of a cosmopolitics that is maximally inclusive in its engagement with alterity.

This chapter aims at clarifying some fundamental concepts of Bruno Latour’s philosophical sociology. It shows that the concept of “actor,” or “actant,” was derived from the semiology of Algirdas ...
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This chapter aims at clarifying some fundamental concepts of Bruno Latour’s philosophical sociology. It shows that the concept of “actor,” or “actant,” was derived from the semiology of Algirdas Julien Greimas. In addition, it depicts Latour’s gradual shift from the semiological to a pragmatist notion of “actors.” This shift occurs in Latour’s dialogue with Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers that he increasingly engages in in the late 1980s.Less

Of Actants, Forces, and Things

Henning Schmidgen

Published in print: 2014-10-15

This chapter aims at clarifying some fundamental concepts of Bruno Latour’s philosophical sociology. It shows that the concept of “actor,” or “actant,” was derived from the semiology of Algirdas Julien Greimas. In addition, it depicts Latour’s gradual shift from the semiological to a pragmatist notion of “actors.” This shift occurs in Latour’s dialogue with Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers that he increasingly engages in in the late 1980s.

This chapter focuses on the early life of Louis VIII the Lion. In September 1187 Philip II Augustus, then twenty-two years of age, had already been the king of France for seven years. His wife, ...
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This chapter focuses on the early life of Louis VIII the Lion. In September 1187 Philip II Augustus, then twenty-two years of age, had already been the king of France for seven years. His wife, Isabelle of Hainaut, was presented to him as a bride in the spring of 1180, when she had just turned ten and he was fifteen. Queen Isabelle gave birth to a boy in the early evening of September 5, 1187. The new prince was named Louis in honour of his grandfather and other illustrious ancestors. As Isabelle was descended from Charlemagne and Philip from Hugh Capet, Louis could claim descent from both of France's legendary kings, so his great destiny seemed assured and prophecies began to circulate about his future. This chapter discusses Louis the Lion's birth, baptism, health, childhood and education, marriage to Blanche of Castile, married life, and children and family, and knighting.Less

The Shaping of a Prince

Catherine Hanley

Published in print: 2016-06-21

This chapter focuses on the early life of Louis VIII the Lion. In September 1187 Philip II Augustus, then twenty-two years of age, had already been the king of France for seven years. His wife, Isabelle of Hainaut, was presented to him as a bride in the spring of 1180, when she had just turned ten and he was fifteen. Queen Isabelle gave birth to a boy in the early evening of September 5, 1187. The new prince was named Louis in honour of his grandfather and other illustrious ancestors. As Isabelle was descended from Charlemagne and Philip from Hugh Capet, Louis could claim descent from both of France's legendary kings, so his great destiny seemed assured and prophecies began to circulate about his future. This chapter discusses Louis the Lion's birth, baptism, health, childhood and education, marriage to Blanche of Castile, married life, and children and family, and knighting.

In the dialogue presented in this chapter, Isabelle Huppert and Antoinette Fouque talk about novelist Nathalie Sarraute and her style of writing. Fouque thinks that Sarraute is following in the ...
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In the dialogue presented in this chapter, Isabelle Huppert and Antoinette Fouque talk about novelist Nathalie Sarraute and her style of writing. Fouque thinks that Sarraute is following in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, but that she goes much further than Woolf. According to Fouque, Sarraute has confronted what she calls the archi-unconscious, which lies below the unconscious, below its figurability. Huppert says Sarraute works on the edge, on the border of madness, and suggests that what she makes visible in her work is what is invisible in her personality. From her point of view as an actress, she thinks that the states Sarraute transmits through her figures of speech could easily be turned into films. Fouque and Huppert also tackles psychoanalysis, the so-called “actress's paradox,” androgyny, and feminism.Less

Dialogue with Isabelle Huppert : December 15, 1993

Antoinette FouqueJean-Joseph Goux

Published in print: 2015-02-24

In the dialogue presented in this chapter, Isabelle Huppert and Antoinette Fouque talk about novelist Nathalie Sarraute and her style of writing. Fouque thinks that Sarraute is following in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, but that she goes much further than Woolf. According to Fouque, Sarraute has confronted what she calls the archi-unconscious, which lies below the unconscious, below its figurability. Huppert says Sarraute works on the edge, on the border of madness, and suggests that what she makes visible in her work is what is invisible in her personality. From her point of view as an actress, she thinks that the states Sarraute transmits through her figures of speech could easily be turned into films. Fouque and Huppert also tackles psychoanalysis, the so-called “actress's paradox,” androgyny, and feminism.

This chapter introduces a case study, exploring the popular, medical, and bioethical debates following the first partial face transplant of Isabelle Dinoire in 2005. It concentrates on the technical ...
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This chapter introduces a case study, exploring the popular, medical, and bioethical debates following the first partial face transplant of Isabelle Dinoire in 2005. It concentrates on the technical aspects of the surgery, as well as the way that it was framed by surgeons and bioethicists in the medical literature during early attempts to get ethical approval for the FAT. The chapter argues that there was space in the initial journalistic coverage of the surgery to imagine it as something other than strictly cosmetic and strictly self- serving, imagining and taking seriously the therapeutic possibilities of facial interventions. The earliest news narratives were cautiously positive, celebrating the practical advantages of the procedure for (recipient) Isabelle Dinoire and future patients. It then looks at how and why that space constricted as Isabelle Dinoire and her doctors were put on journalistic trial for attempting to win what newspapers around the world dubbed “the face race”. While broad bioethical concerns provided the ostensible framework for these challenges, the underlying narrative rested on a discomfort with Dinoire’s own right to the procedure, which occupied an ambiguous space between medically necessary reconstruction and elective aesthetic surgery. Ultimately coverage was highly critical and negative.Less

Decoding the Face-Transplant Debates

Sharrona Pearl

Published in print: 2017-04-24

This chapter introduces a case study, exploring the popular, medical, and bioethical debates following the first partial face transplant of Isabelle Dinoire in 2005. It concentrates on the technical aspects of the surgery, as well as the way that it was framed by surgeons and bioethicists in the medical literature during early attempts to get ethical approval for the FAT. The chapter argues that there was space in the initial journalistic coverage of the surgery to imagine it as something other than strictly cosmetic and strictly self- serving, imagining and taking seriously the therapeutic possibilities of facial interventions. The earliest news narratives were cautiously positive, celebrating the practical advantages of the procedure for (recipient) Isabelle Dinoire and future patients. It then looks at how and why that space constricted as Isabelle Dinoire and her doctors were put on journalistic trial for attempting to win what newspapers around the world dubbed “the face race”. While broad bioethical concerns provided the ostensible framework for these challenges, the underlying narrative rested on a discomfort with Dinoire’s own right to the procedure, which occupied an ambiguous space between medically necessary reconstruction and elective aesthetic surgery. Ultimately coverage was highly critical and negative.

The second chapter discusses Françoise de Graffigny’s Letters from a Peruvian Woman (1747) and Isabelle de Charrière’s Letters of Mistress Henley (1784). Responding to Nancy Armstrong, the chapter ...
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The second chapter discusses Françoise de Graffigny’s Letters from a Peruvian Woman (1747) and Isabelle de Charrière’s Letters of Mistress Henley (1784). Responding to Nancy Armstrong, the chapter shows that Graffigny and Charrière subvert their period’s fascination with letters as means of affirming the larger significance of small domestic interactions and events. Instead, these two epistolary novelists treat the physical smallness of these letters as a metonymy of their protagonists’ similarly limited scopes of material presence and experience. At the end of both novels, the protagonists no longer look to their letters as measures of their ambitious hopes of being heard and understood. The letters reflect, instead, their frailty and finitude as beings who expect such attention from others.Less

The Writer

Marta Figlerowicz

Published in print: 2017-01-26

The second chapter discusses Françoise de Graffigny’s Letters from a Peruvian Woman (1747) and Isabelle de Charrière’s Letters of Mistress Henley (1784). Responding to Nancy Armstrong, the chapter shows that Graffigny and Charrière subvert their period’s fascination with letters as means of affirming the larger significance of small domestic interactions and events. Instead, these two epistolary novelists treat the physical smallness of these letters as a metonymy of their protagonists’ similarly limited scopes of material presence and experience. At the end of both novels, the protagonists no longer look to their letters as measures of their ambitious hopes of being heard and understood. The letters reflect, instead, their frailty and finitude as beings who expect such attention from others.

Chapter 10 explores the ways in which intertexuality within and between the stages of writing, directing, and performing the film The Piano Teacher create a multi-authored text. In the absence of an ...
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Chapter 10 explores the ways in which intertexuality within and between the stages of writing, directing, and performing the film The Piano Teacher create a multi-authored text. In the absence of an ethnography of production impossible for films made in the past, the authors devised a “soft ethnography” approach focused on some key players in this “multiply authored” semiotic model (namely, the prize-winning author, director, and lead actor) to suggest the flow and feedback between these different “signatures” in the text. This soft ethnography is grounded in knowledge of the writer’s discursive history and politics, the director’s television/film sense of liberation via “obscene” cinema, and the actor’s “directing” (via her construction of character) through her performance as a developing part of her star persona. These personal/public negotiations are symptomatic of the reflexive “synthesize and extend” interdisciplinary approach of Real Sex Cinema.Less

Beyond High Theories of Intimacy : Authorship, Performance, and “Obscenity” in

John TullochBelinda Middleweek

Published in print: 2017-12-28

Chapter 10 explores the ways in which intertexuality within and between the stages of writing, directing, and performing the film The Piano Teacher create a multi-authored text. In the absence of an ethnography of production impossible for films made in the past, the authors devised a “soft ethnography” approach focused on some key players in this “multiply authored” semiotic model (namely, the prize-winning author, director, and lead actor) to suggest the flow and feedback between these different “signatures” in the text. This soft ethnography is grounded in knowledge of the writer’s discursive history and politics, the director’s television/film sense of liberation via “obscene” cinema, and the actor’s “directing” (via her construction of character) through her performance as a developing part of her star persona. These personal/public negotiations are symptomatic of the reflexive “synthesize and extend” interdisciplinary approach of Real Sex Cinema.